On Sand Island

On Sand Island

Speaking of Sand Island, one of the truly indigenous children’s books of the Apostle Islands is On Sand Island drawn from a true story of one of the fishing families that inhabited the island in the late 19th Century. Young Carl Dahl is tracked through the book as he seeks ways to build the case for his having a boat of his own so that he might become more like his fisherman father. The text is finely honed and evocative and the misty watercolor illustrations provide just the right tone for a somewhat sober, but compelling and pleasurable, children’s book. It brings to life the stories pursued by Feldman in A Storied Wilderness and provides a picture of what Noring Farm might have been like in its day.